A few years after the establishment of the republic the
plebeians compelled the patricians to allow them to have officers of their own,
called tribunes, as a means of protection. There were ten tribunes, elected
annually by the plebeians. Any tribune could veto, that is, forbid, the act of
a magistrate which seemed to bear harshly on a citizen. To make sure that a
tribune's orders would be respected, his person was made sacred and a solemn
curse was pronounced upon the man who injured him or interrupted him in the
performance of his duties. The tribune's authority, however, extended only
within the city and a mile beyond its walls. He was quite powerless against the
consul in the field.
THE TWELVE TABLES, 449 B.C.
We next find the plebeians struggling for equality before
the law. Just as in ancient Athens, the early Roman laws had never been
written down or published. About half a century after the plebeians had
obtained the tribunes, they forced the patricians to give them written laws. A
board of ten men, known as decemvirs, was appointed to frame a legal code,
binding equally on both patricians and plebeians. The story goes that this
commission studied the legislation of the Greek states of southern Italy, and
even went to Athens to examine some of Solon's laws which were still in force.
The laws framed by the decemvirs were engraved on twelve bronze tablets and set
up in the Forum. A few sentences from this famous code have come down to us in
rude, unpolished Latin. They mark the beginning of what was to be Rome's
greatest gift to civilization—her legal system.
